I am 100% for the comments you had about changing the backend to be more generalizable. I think that a plugin type architecture for this type of thing would be ideal...
My thoughts: We currently have the <math> tags and are considering <music> and <tex>, right? At what point are we going to realize that the stuff that goes between these tags all share the same idea. That is, they are all text rendered into images and/or HTML for presentation. I think that it is crazy to add a tag every time we want to support a new renderer. We should use a single tag, and a modifier. A few possible examples:
<render type=tex>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=math>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=texvc>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=lilypond>\notes{r4 <a c e> c e}</render>
That way, Toby could lobby (and create...) for a different math rendering engine without stopping progress on texvc, and people who like texvc could use it if they wanted.
Of course I realize that this adds a bit of complexity for the wikipedian who is editing the code in the first place, but it could remove a huge burden from the wikipedia developers. We could just publish a "render plugin API", and hope that someone from planetmath, or lilypond or whatever group of developers would take interest and write a plugin for that project.
Just my $0.02
Jason
Brion Vibber wrote:
On lun, 2002-12-30 at 13:08, Magnus Manske wrote:
What's with the Tex feature update? Anything final yet?
It's sitting in CVS, and the fixed English language file looks right. (** But we're still missing translations for the TeX options for most languages! **)
Shall I install it wikipedia-wide? Is there any objection other than Toby's? See: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texvc
On a related note, I'd like some feedback on the suggestion to provide support for inline musical notation via GNU Lilypond: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_markup
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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